14 January 2013

Jette Steckel’s new
production of this German classic is a buzz, a rush, a gig; Büchner’s
script, one of the most astonishing products of 19th century European
theatre, is given a more minor role. Until the performance last night
(Dec. 29th 2012), all previous performances of Steckel’s production had
been accompanied by English surtitles, in an explicit attempt by the
Thalia Theater to reach out to an international audience in Hamburg, who
would otherwise not go to a German language play of this complexity.
Which was one reason I went to see the play in the first place – to
experience how well the surtitles worked, and to see what kind of
international audience they are attracting. For unknown reasons, Thalia
dropped the surtitles from last night’s performance. So if anyone from
Thalia is reading this: would you be so kind as to post a few words, as
to why the surtitles were withdrawn?

Set in 1794, five
years after the outbreak of the French Revolution, the drama develops
out of the tension between two of the revolution’s leaders, Maximilien
de Robespierre and Georges Danton, the former portrayed as a
cold-hearted, dogmatic, puritan, the latter as an empathetic,
philosophical, sensualist. Hounded by Robespierre and his close
colleague St Just, Danton and three supporters are guillotined in the
production’s final scene, corresponding to real events in April 1794.
What Büchner chose not to show was that Robespierre was guillotined just
three months later in July 1794, together with St Just, and twenty
other supporters, as the flame of revolutionary terror, which
Robespierre had done so much to feed, turned against him.

Steckel sprints
through Büchner’s narrative, with an almost ceaseless live soundtrack
provided by a keyboardist and electric guitarist. In one key debate
scene, Daniel Lommatzch (Robespierre) goes head to head musically with
Jörg Pohl (Danton) on the drums, the two of them sat behind full-scale
drum kits facing the audience, and smashing out their drum solos,
sounding for all the world like professional drummers. The spoken text
is mixed in on top of all that, delivered through actors all wearing
millimetre thin wireless microphones taped to their cheeks. You can hear
some dialogues better than others, depending on how much sonic space
the director has allocated to the musicians bigging it up with
electronic wa-wowho-wa noises at that particular point in the action.
This is reminiscent of how crowds during the French Revolution
experienced speeches they heard; many words of speeches must have been
lost to open-air acoustics and the jeers and cheers of the mob.
Steckel’s decision to soundscape the production in this way certainly
captures the hysteria and indecision of the time: which path to believe
in, when five different skilled polemicists are all shouting a different
message? And, as it sounds to us, the rabble, they’re all shouting at
the same time.

The texts in the
print programme for the production mix polemic and philosophy, and
invite us to compare attacks on capitalism today, and the attack shaped
by the Occupy movement in particular, with the French terror depicted on
the stage. If the Thalia seriously wants to attract the English
speaking audience in Hamburg who don’t have high-level German skills to
this play, then the decision not to include English
translations/versions of all three texts is a mistake. It was also a
mistake to omit the name of the German language translator of the
(originally English language) speech given by Slavoj Žižek to the Occupy
movement in New York in October 2011.

These small objections
aside, the programme’s engrossing texts make it top-heavy with an
intellectual force which the production itself is disinterested in
utilising. How convincing are Jörg Pohl-as-Danton’s arguments, which he
uses to defend his “vice-filled” (Robespierre’s term) approach to
revolutionary life? Should his silent withdrawal — his refusal to lead —
be interpreted as strategy, as the same strategy advocated by Žižek for
Occupy? : maintain your silence in the power vacuum you’ve created.
It’s your strongest weapon, your equivalent of the French terror. Don’t
relinquish this weapon by filling the vacuum with hasty, specific,
inadequate demands. Is this the game Pohl’s Danton is playing? Very hard
to tell, hearing his statements between one guitar riff and the next,
overlapping, exhilarating drum solo. Though neither Pohl’s words, nor
Lommatzch’s as Danton, nor those of Karin Neuhäuser playing a
marvellously nasty St Just, do drown in this swamp of beautiful din.
They gasp for breath instead, shouting of their own worth, shouting of
the necessity of reading them, alone, muse-fully, in silence. (Danton’s
Death first premièred in 1902, 67 years after it was first published in a
heavily censored form. Reading the play as opposed to watching it has
pedigree.) Then, if like me you have not already done so, go and read
several perspectives on the French Revolution, by contemporary
historians. Žižek’s words are just one of many signs that a new terror,
of a quite different sort than the French variety, is building in the
world again.